La diserzione dello sguardo. Appunti sulla sorte dell’immagine aerea nel cinema contemporaneo

The aerial view has traditionally represented a powerful “optical paradigm” of modern visual culture, being connected to the ideas of precision, effectiveness and victory, and film studies bring it back to the “cartographic vocation” of early cinema. In particular, war film genre habitually uses aerial imagery, satellite and aerial views. However, little attention has been devoted to the way aerial views are presented in contemporary war films. This essay aims to investigate how aerial imagery is used and commented in contemporary films about the recent Middle-East wars. Indeed, several films reveal a completely changed attitude and a widespread mistrust towards aerial imagery. By showing its distance and violence, as well as its ineffectiveness and fallibility, they illustrate a radical and unprecedented “rhetorical shift” in cinema and visual culture. As a matter of fact, investigating what is left today of the original quality of aerial imagery involves some implications that go far beyond war film genre and radically question the cartographic mission of the cinematic medium.